Read Online Always Say Goodbye: A Lew Fonesca Mystery by Stuart M. Kaminsky - Free Book Online Page A

you. Call it a loving eulogy. Or try this, someone is responsible for your wife’s death. You don’t want them to forget what they have done. Also, you don’t know what or who you might find. Your sense of the world, your two-room world, may be forever changed by what you find. And that could be good.”
    “Or bad.”
    “Or bad,” she agreed. “Or something that can’t be defined by good and bad.”
    “All right,” he said.
    “Good. Remember, no matter what you find, you can always come back here to your misery.”
    “That’s comforting,” Lew said.
    “And in your case, I know you mean that. Are you going to go to the cemetery?”
    “No. There’s nothing there but a stone cross.”
    “It’s not what is there, Lewis, but what you bring there with you. The Daily Show is coming on. Good night.”
    She hung up. Lew was sitting in the pillowed wicker chair in Teresa’s room, the phone in his lap.
    When Ann hung up, he sat there thought about Catherine’s missing file, the one Pappas and Andrej Posnitki and, for all Lew knew, maybe Claude Santoro wanted as well. All of the things in Catherine’s and his apartment had been been boxed, taped and taken to his uncle Tonio’s warehouse on Fullerton by Angie, Franco, Tonio and some of Tonio’s men after Lew had left Chicago. Lew hadn’t wanted to look at any of it then. He didn’t want to now.
    Milt Holiger had told Lew that he and two Assistant State Attorneys had gone through all of the files in Catherine’s two
cabinets and the contents of the drawers of her office desk. Nothing was surprising in them, nothing about an upcoming case that might lead to someone running her down. Lew believed him. Milt was good, but Lew was another set of eyes, another history.
    “The active files,” Milt had said, “were turned over to other lawyers in the department. The closed-case files have been crated and stored.”
    Lew decided that in the morning he would move again, go through the motions, do the one thing he did well, find people, let them talk. He got up. He hadn’t unpacked anything from his duffel bag. He didn’t intend to. He unzipped the blue cloth bag, took out clean socks, underwear, a folded white button-down shirt, a folded blue shirt, a rolled-up black T-shirt with the faded words THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE, and a Ziploc plastic bag containing his toothbrush, toothpaste and disposable razor. He laid them out on one side of the bed next to his zippered denim jacket.
    Teresa had a small bathroom inside her room, no bath, just a shower. Angie had put out a pair of towels on the sink. Ten minutes later Lew turned out the light and lay in bed, looking up at the ceiling at the swaying shadows of the branches of the tree outside of Teresa’s window.
    Just before he fell asleep a name came to him: Rebecca Strum.
    A thousand miles south in Florida, the hurricane season had begun.
     
     
    Lew was up early, the sun warm across his eyes. He covered his face with his arms, but thoughts, names, memories cometed through his mind with fleeting images he almost recognized.
This time he wasn’t dealing with someone else’s missing husband, wife, mother or child. He wasn’t losing himself in someone else’s loss. This Chicago pain was all his.
    Dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved, reasonably ironed blue shirt with a collar that could have used a couple of stays, Lew tucked his Cubs cap on his head, put on his white socks and sneakers, checked for the first signs of daily stubble on his cheeks and neck and looked at himself in Teresa’s mirror.
    Catherine said that he looked particularly good in blue shirts. She seemed to mean it. He didn’t think he had looked particularly good when she had said it and he certainly didn’t think so this morning.
    Lew put on his denim jacket.
    Franco was sitting in his overstuffed chair in the living room. The chair had been sat into exhaustion by three generations of Massaccio and Fonesca men. Franco was drinking coffee from a white